Hamburg signs “Van the Man“ from Real Madrid – Answering injury problems

Imme­di­ately after Hamburg’s loss against Borus­sia Dort­mund, the club offi­cials announced the trans­fer of dutch striker Ruud van Nis­tel­rooy, who played for the Span­ish club Real Madrid. Van Nis­tel­rooy singed a con­tract till june 2011.

Ham­burg won the com­pe­ti­tion of sign­ing Van Nis­tel­rooy against Galatasaray Istan­bul and sev­eral Premier-League teams, who would pay much more wage than the Ger­man club. Van Nis­tel­rooy said that Ham­burg was his first choice because of the club per­spec­tives and his per­sonal ambi­tions to play for a top team. The Premier-League teams like West Ham United had to deal with rel­e­ga­tion this season.

With sign­ing Van Nis­tel­rooy Ham­burg hope­fully solves its injury prob­lems, espe­cially its striker prob­lems. Paolo Guer­rero is seri­ously injured with a cru­ci­ate lig­a­ment rup­ture; Markus Berg and Tunay Torun are tal­ented but they aren’t a con­trib­u­tory fac­tor for win­ning the title. Mladen Pet­ric is cur­rently the only player, who’s the con­di­tion to play at top level.

Because of that Ham­burg needed to sign a striker to stay in touch with the top teams like Bayer Lev­erkusen, Bay­ern Munich, Dort­mund and Schalke.

 My Opin­ion:

It is a good move to sign a 33-year old striker, who only was a mem­ber of the reserve squad in the past months? – I think I would negate this for nearly every striker in this sit­u­a­tion, but not for “Van the Man”……. I think his vari­ety, his sta­tis­tics and his char­ac­ter sug­gest that Ham­burg made a good deal in sign­ing him. He played very suc­cess­ful for all of his teams and was always appre­ci­ated by his team­mates and fans.

Van Nis­tel­rooy is a type of player Ham­burg des­per­ately needed. Ham­burg need a player who scores goals inside the penalty box and this abil­ity made Van Nis­tel­rooy so famous in Man­ches­ter and all across Europe. The inter­ac­tion with Eljero Elia, Piotr Tro­chowski and Malden Pet­ric will be suc­cess­ful, if…….

Van Nis­tel­rooy over­comes the after­math of his knee injury form Novem­ber 2008. This fact is maybe the dark horse of the deal – Will he be still in the right con­di­tion?? I HOPE SO!